


Variation

by Shyrstyne



Category: Little Nightmares (Video Game)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, No Dialogue, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-19 04:00:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29620266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shyrstyne/pseuds/Shyrstyne
Summary: He knows this has happened before. Maybe he can keep it from happening again.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 111





	Variation

**Author's Note:**

> ever just get the urge to do something completely out of your usual wheelhouse? that's this. given little nightmares is.... let's call it subjective in nature, liberal amounts of headcanon have been applied.

He is tired.

He’s always been tired, in truth, but once he’d had a sense of hope to buoy him. He doesn’t have that now. He hasn’t for a long time. Now what he has is the empty nothing and the maddening Signal running through him at every moment.

Was the Signal his, or something else that’s simply become a part of him over time? He doesn’t know. Does it matter? Probably not. He’s alone here. There are people outside, drawn by the Signal just as he once was, but even his loneliness is not enough to want them here. People are big (he is big now), and people are dangerous (and oh he is so very dangerous).

At a point, time becomes meaningless. What are moments and days when he is trapped in this comparatively tiny radius of the Signal’s call?

He does not understand the Signal, and in return the Signal is incapable of understanding him. This is a sort of power too, in its own way. They use each other, him for power, the Signal to sustain itself.

Something must always sustain it.

It is the only thing he knows about the Signal, that it draws life from those unfortunate enough to be caught in its grasp, driving them closer with frenzied need and pulling on that life. He is the only one to have been able to grasp back, that he knows of, attaining some kind of lonely, warped balance.

It isn’t worth it, but he can’t let go either.

Not like she had.

He doesn’t scream, and he doesn’t cry, only sits in his chair in numb reverie. Numbness turns to anger, turns to forced calm, turns to regret, turns to anger again. He’s had a lot of time to think here after all. Not that it matters.

Until suddenly it does.

Is it the Signal? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t understand the Signal, but he does understand what he see through it, and through it he sees two tiny bodies that it takes him far too long to realise why they look so familiar.

It’s him.

It’s _her_.

It doesn’t matter how, does it really? He moves for the first time in what must be years, clothing creaking and dust scattering from his long limbs. He is tall now. He doesn’t remember where he had gotten the clothes from. A corpse? Likely. He still likes hats, and finds pleasure in this tiny fact. He’s still him. He’s still him.

The other him must be warned.

He draws on the Signal, tries to pull the Other in, only for him to be jerked away by her. The Signal cuts out, but there’s another point not too far away- not strong enough to pull like the televisions can, but strong enough for him to peer through, and watches, seething with fury.

He doesn’t expect what he sees.

He’d forgotten, before the betrayal. She had helped him, saved him as he’d saved her.

They’d been friends.

It makes the betrayal sting worse.

But it also… makes him wonder. After everything, why had she let him go? He’d known she was a little… off, and ruthlessly practical, but he had not thought that she might drop him. Why had she reached out for him at all then? Surely it would have been easier to simply turn tail and run, letting him fall to the abyss unaided.

He doesn’t understand, and suddenly this bothers him far more than not understanding the Signal.

He watches, and he waits. The city is dangerous, as nearly every place is to the small folk, all the moreso to children like them. Near miss after close call after almost disaster.

She is dragged away, separated from the Other, and he takes this chance.

Once, he had killed himself, unknowingly, donning the hat and becoming this long, thin imitation of himself. Once, he imagines, that version had done the same. And the one before that. And before that.

Was there a beginning? An end?

Could he end it?

The Signal screeches, horrible white noise at the peak of it’s volume, as if sensing his thoughts. It needs him. The balance they have crafted here is integral to it. He quiets his thoughts, but keeps his intent, and this is enough to satisfy the Signal for now.

There aren’t many televisions in the school, but he’s lucky enough that she is dragged past one of the few standing televisions in the hall that is yet unbroken and still powered. His arrival sends out a burst of static as it always does, and she trips and rolls as one of the dolls accidentally drops her arm. She drags it down, ripping its arm from its socket and swinging wildly as three others close in on her. Two porcelain heads shatter and the third is knocked back.

The one from whom she had taken the arm stands, but she’s ready for it, beating it down until shards of ceramic fly upward with force, leaving tiny, barely noticeable cuts on her hands and cheeks. Whatever blood that falls is indistinguishable from the dirt and grime and other injuries already present.

She pants as the dolls scatter, still holding the bent arm.

He’d never seen the dolls scatter before, but then again they had never taken him prisoner either. More of that latent draw from the Signal that existed even within his young self? Mayhaps.

He waits in the television, one that sits on the very edge of his range, and knows she can sense him. She looks up at the box, and he sees that wooden, mistrustful stare of hers, judging, waiting to see which direction the attack would come from.

He does not attack.

He wants to know.

But how can she answer something that has not happened for her yet? How could she know what minutia might have gone through her mind in that moment when as yet that moment does not exist?

He looks out at her, wondering, and then sees her shadow.

It’s like all the other shadows the Signal has left. It does not leave empty bodies and limp clothing like it does the big people, for the little people it takes what little they have to offer and leaves a static shadow, lifeless and dim in their place.

Her shadow is neither lifeless nor dim.

It stands as if layered over her in his vision, unlike any other he has seen, and he wonders what that means.

She looks at him with detachment and determination, her shadow looks at him with exhaustion and fear.

Which is which, he wonders. He wonders. He wonders. Is there a True Her, or were they both her, some different instance, some different variant? Who had rescued him, who had let him fall?

He cannot ask. The mystery grows. Nothing yet has changed.

Despite it all… He misses her. Companionship was a drug he had not had in so very long.

She leaves, to reunite soon with his Other Self he knows. He blinks out, from one television to the next. He watches, he waits.

And yet, this is not the same, he realises.

He had found her, strung up by the dolls in some washroom, hadn’t he? Instead this time she saves him from a profoundly deadly ambush, swinging her impromptu weapon with force, joined quickly by his Other Self as he gets his bearings.

Small changes, nothing more, and yet her shadow looks at him through the Signal with something in her that he cannot decipher.

Closer, closer. More televisions, more places to watch. This is the Doctor's land now, fastidious and cruel, he remembers this. Hand, mannequins and hands and things moving in the dark. Most of the televisions are dim and unpowered, but he forces the Signal through- he needs to see.

And just as he sees them, _she_ sees him too. She tugs his Other Self away from the lit television, cautious and hard, and he makes no move to startle them. He does not pull this time, though he can hardly help the natural magnetism of the Signal itself. It writhes and cries, but he forces it back. You Are Me, he tells it, And I am You. Where one started and the other began is unknown and irrelevant. This narrative must end, and he is going to force it to accept that.

Slowly, slowly, it quiets, and he crouches in his liminal space, still staring out at two tiny bodies who stare right back.

He cannot reach out. He remembers the terror, running- running! Fear and adrenaline coursing through him as the Thin Man had inched ever closer. What might have happened if he had been caught? He doesn’t know.

The Thin Man had been terrifying, and Mono had thought him the villain, and thus knew the secrets of this city.

Now he knows better, and that is possibly the only thing he knows.

His Other Self inches closer, and though she doesn’t stop him, she doesn’t let go of his hand either, ready to drag him away at the slightest wrong move.

He uncurls, just slightly, and the two little bodies flinch back but don’t run, so he stops. He reaches out a hand, not far enough to cover even half the distance between them, and lets it rest against the floor, palm upward.

He doesn’t know if this will work, but he has to try.

Inch by momentous inch, the two little ones creep forward, well earned distrust in both of them, worn from a brutally short lifetime in a world that has had every intent of harm on them.

His Other Self reaches him first, and that pinprick of contact- of palm to fingertip- makes them both gasp, and the Signal courses between them, a cacophony of images and feelings and the hellish noise of static.

His Other Self stares up at him in awe and fear, but a different sort than what he remembers. The fear of knowing perhaps? What little he knows, at any rate. The more he learns the less he knows, but it’s more than his little Other had before at least.

The little version of himself turns his head to look at her, and gestures her closer, and hesitantly, she comes. Her touch is different from his own, but it still vibrates in the air between them. She is not attuned to the Signal like he is and was, cannot be, but she has her own mysteries, her own strife, and he sees it now in a way he did not before.

Something lies within her, some sleeping beast that is yet leashed but not for much longer. She’s as terrified of it as he once was of himself. More than that… She’s done this before. She’s done this as many times as he has, and it’s here that the partition becomes clear.

Conscious and unconscious, knowing and unknowing. All they can do is try.

She had dropped him to save him from her Beast, dooming him to a fate he’s not sure is better than death. He does not forgive her, but he thinks he understands now.

He looks down at them, so tiny against his long, thin fingers. The Signal had fed from him, and he from the Signal. He is not who he used to be.

He knows what he needs to do now. He doesn’t know how.

He turns his head towards the tower, where he has been trapped for so long, and then his time is up, and he blinks from their sight.

He’s back in his chair, exhausted but satisfied. Something has changed. Maybe more can change too. The little ones are taking his meaning and heading for the tower, and he watches through the televisions that grow ever more common as they get closer.

And then

And then

His Other Self screams, wordless fear, and it echoes deafeningly through the Signal, clanging like discordant cymbals in the tiny endless space. He reaches out, and on the other side he sees the Doctor, bulbous and yet sly, his compulsion also his survival in this wasteland, and his hands are wrapped around her, tugging her away from a helplessly reaching-

Rage fills him, more emotion than he has felt in time unknown, and he flashes through the Signal, the force of his movement shoving the Doctor back and dislodging him from his perch on the ceiling. The bulbous man drops his prize instinctively, and she bounces twice before rolling to a stop beneath some dirty counter.

The Doctor cowers, not knowing what he faces but knowing malicious intent from long experience of inflicting it.

He is tired of this craven being. This world is full of awful things, and even he with all his power cannot cleanse it, but this one… This one he can.

When he is finished he turns towards the dark spaces beneath the tables, where two tiny shining eyes glint back, He crouches once more, reaching out his hand as he had done before.

Blackened blood drips from it, but neither seem to notice as they creep forward. He can feel exhaustion setting into his bones, it takes so much energy to do this, but it’s worth it. He has to try.

She… Six, her name is Six, reaches out first this time. She glances to his Other Self.

Mono. A name he has no claim to anymore. Let the little one have it now, let him carry it to somewhere new.

Mono touches his hand, and the edges of his long fingers fizz erratically. Mono tilts his head up at him, and in response he looks pointedly at the lit television nearby.

Six nods, understanding. He cannot help them if they are away from his sight. Her shadow does not nod, and he scrutinises it closer. It stares blankly back for a long moment, and then turns to look at Mono, who remains entirely unaware of it.

There’s a flash, and the shadow hunches, as if writhing in hunger, and then returns to normal in the space of a blink.

She’s holding on, but she can’t indefinitely. Not as she is.

His time runs out, and he returns to his prison for now.

But now they know to call, and he knows to answer.

It's a start.

**Author's Note:**

> anyway back to your reguarly scheduled kh


End file.
